Wellington

I am participating in the Photoforum Members Show at Studio 541, Mt Eden, Auckland, New Zealand. I rejoined Photoforum when I was at Photobook-NZ in Wellington after several years absence. I submitted 3 images (medium format, colour negative film) for inclusion in the Members Show, which were made when I was walking Wellington on a recent visit. The exhibition was oversubscribed, so the curators/organizers reduced the three images to two. However, it was only due to the stirling work at very short notice by the team at Atkins Photo Lab in Adelaide that I was able to get the images printed, framed and couriered to Auckland. We had a week to do it.

All the images in the Photoforum exhibition are posted on Studio 541’s website along with the bio’s and artist statements. These show a diverse range of work that stands in opposition to, and digs beneath, the NZ is beautiful or a paradise school of photography.

Photo Forum Members’ Show 2018.

Photoforum was co-founded in 1973 by John B Turner, Tom Hutchins and Max Oettli to promote photography as an artistic and expressive medium, to encourage co-operation and collaboration amongst the photographic community, and to provide mentoring for photographers. A secondary, but crucial aim, was to encourage photographers to actively engage in the public risk-taking of critical writing and curatorial practice, outside of the universities and polytechnics.

Over its 40 years history Photoforum has also helped to nurture a critical environment, but there is still a lack of critics and historians to better cover the field of photography in New Zealand. My memories of the early years when I was a member was that documentary photography has been the dominant language of PhotoForum photography.There is nothing like this community-orientated non-profit organisation, which has made valuable contributions to New Zealand art and art history, amongst the art photographers in Australia. We independent Australian art photographers are much poorer as a result of not having a similar DIY community of expressive photographers. Continue Reading…

I attended the opening on Friday night at Te Papa, heard the Peter Turner Memorial Lecture given by Jem Southam on the Saturday night, spend the Sunday at Massey University listening to the talks and panel discussions, reconnected with Sally Jackman (an old friend who I hadn’t seen since my time in Melbourne in the 1970s) on the Sunday night, and photographed around Newton on Monday. I flew back to Adelaide on Tuesday. All in all it was a wonderful and fruitful weekend.

Whakatane, New Zealand

The highlight of the Sunday session at Massey University for me was the talk by Katrin Koenning, a German photographer now based in Melbourne. The talk centred around the ongoing Indefinitely project, which is about the space created by her family’s migration. The notion underpinning this is that this space is not a vacuum or a void, but rather the creator of new narratives. This grew out of an earlier project Near, which was about Koenning’s migratory experience. What I found interesting in this body of work in her talk was the emphasis on emotionality, darkness, and strong contrasts between darkness and light in her pictures. Continue Reading…

In early March I spent a week walking Wellington, New Zealand as well as photographing in the city, whilst Suzanne walked the Grand Traverse, Queenstown way with her Adelaide walking friends. I had studio apartment in the Aro Valley courtesy of Air bnb, and I spent about 8 hours a day walking the city in a Situationist mode. I drifted through central Wellington with two camera bags on my shoulders: one containing a Rolleiflex (TLR) a Leica M4-P rangefinder whilst the other held my newly acquired Sony Alpha A7r111, which I was slowly learning how to use.

2 houses, Wellington

I loved Wellington. It’s a funky, vibrant cultured city. I was so at home being there. Even though Wellington is a much smaller city than Adelaide in population terms, it is so much more alive in an urban sense. Despite the revitalisation since 2013 of the central city and the liquor-licensing reforms Adelaide remains a doughnut city. Wellington was much more alive than it was when I worked there in the 1970s as an economist in the public service. Then it was empty of life at the centre with little in the way of depth of character. The central city is a much better place these days.

Wellington also has a strong art photography culture which, unlike Australia, is connected to, and a part of, a literay culture. There is also a vibrant café culture with excellent coffee scattered amongst the Wellington ‘walkability’. The funky changes in the urban culture happened in the 1990s apparently, but I am not sure what the driving forces for the city’s transformation were, given that Wellington is largely a public service town. Was the emergence of a lively urban culture caused by the acceleration of diverse migration flows? Continue Reading…

I have been digging around the web looking for more contemporary Wellington-based photographers, other than those I mentioned in an earlier post here and here on this blog. In doing so I came across the work of Mark Marriott, Hans Weston,Tracey Kearns —art photographers who have both an online presence and who exhibit regularly. Wellington has a number of good active photographers and small artist-run spaces. The scene appears lively and the work interesting and diverse.

A good example is Mary Macpherson’sOld New World, a book of her photographs made over seven years about change in New Zealand society as seen in the small regional/rural towns throughout the country. The narrative is one of a shift from a traditional New Zealand, to places of prosperity and development that look very different to the 1960s and 70s. Presumably, the background reference is to the way that the neo-liberal mode of capitalism has systematically shaped New Zealand’s economy and society, so deeply affected aspects of everyday life as the process of commodification permeates all segments of society including art. A book is an appropriate form of expression for this kind of photographic work about our historical experiences about what is passing away.

Macpherson, who is a poet as well as a photographer, says that this body of work is part of trying to understand her world and where she fits in it–ie., a trying to make sense of the changes. In that sense photography, as meaningful, sensuous, particular works of art is a form of thinking and self-discovery. What this suggests is that though artworks are indeed objects, the truth-content of art is of the world while also offering critical reflections upon it. This is a stance that is quite different from the contemporary adherents of the Romantic notion that art must establish itself as the antithesis of reason.

tree, Wellington CBD

Whilst reflecting on Macpherson’s Old New World work I became curious about the breadth and depth of the critical writing about photography and the visual arts in Wellington. I wondered if the situation in Wellington was the same as Adelaide. Both are provincial cities with the mainstream newspapers getting smaller, the resources devoted to journalism and editorship dropping, and the space for the visual art continuing to shrink. So where to for critical writing on photography?

Mark Amery, speaking in relation to Wellington, says that the closure of his fortnightly visual arts column with theDominion Postnewspaper in 2014 leaves Wellington without any visual arts commentary. The story is a familiar one: the mainstream media are increasingly treating the visual arts as irrelevant. The consequence is that Wellington’s visual artists are left with the critical writing about their work having a marginal existence in niche online publications, just like Adelaide with the Adelaide Review. Emery, who runs public art programme Letting Space, mentions thePantograph Punch, The Lumière Reader,Eyecontact and The Big Idea in relation to New Zealand. Continue Reading…

My last two visits to Wellington ( New Zealand) have enabled me to see that art photography in Wellington looks to be centred around the PhotoSpace gallery that is run by James Gilberd. The gallery opened in 1992 and it is the longest running photographic gallery in New Zealand. It remains the only gallery in the Wellington region dedicated to exhibiting contemporary New Zealand and international photography. It values a high level of craft and has a stable of established, regular exhibitors.

This gallery has done far more foregrounding New Zealand photography over the past decade than the largely conservative Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery, which have acted to marginalise photographers vis-a -is the public gallery system. They do so with exhibition programmes that function as if New Zealand photography wasn’t happening, or if they acknowledged photography’s existence, they were noted for their absence over the past couple of decades in dealing with the medium of photography critically.